Author:

Ernie Regehr and Douglas Roche

Ernie Regehr is the chairman of Canadians for a Nuclear Weapons Convention, a project of Canadian Pugwash, and the former executive director of Project Ploughshares. Douglas Roche was a senator from 1998 to 2004, and was the Canadian ambassador for disarmament.

The world is about to lose one of the most important nuclear disarmament agreements ever made – and distressingly, Canada is silent.

The 1987 Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty, signed by then-U.S. president Ronald Reagan and former Soviet Union president Mikhail Gorbachev, marked the beginning of the end of the Cold War. It bans the possession, production and flight-testing of ground-launched missiles within the 500-to-5,500 kilometre range and bans launchers for such missiles. Also, it resulted in the elimination of 2,692 Soviet and U.S. missiles based in Europe, and it was key to building an innovative system of verification, data exchanges, and mutual consultations.

Now, U.S. President Donald Trump has said the United States intends to suspend its participation in early February, leading to its termination six months later. The United States says the Russians are cheating. Russia says the United States is stretching the treaty’s boundaries. The debate over who’s right is what verification procedures and diplomatic talks are all about.

In July 2018, the Kremlin released the official transcript of a meeting between President Vladimir Putin and the nation’s special-services employees, when he thanked them for ensuring security during the 2018 World Cup in Russia. Putin revealed in his speech that during the preceding weeks, as millions of people watched the world’s best players kick a soccer ball, “almost 25 million cyberattacks and other criminal attempts on Russia’s information infrastructure … were neutralized”

Millions of cyberattacks over a couple of weeks is a frightening revelation, but the attacks are of particular concern because Russia has the world’s largest deployed arsenal of nuclear weapons. The Federation of American Scientists estimates that as of early 2018, Russia’s nuclear arsenal has 4,350 warheads, of which about 800 are deployed on intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) Russian officials have stated that these missiles are ready to be launched within “several dozen seconds” or “a few tens of seconds.” The United States also has hundreds of nuclear weapons in a similar posture. Long-time nuclear policy analysts Bruce Blair, Hal Feiveson and Frank von Hippel worry about the possibility that “one day someone will mistakenly launch nuclear-tipped missiles, either because of a technical failure or a human error – a mistake made, perhaps, in the rush to respond to false indications of an (enemy) attack.”

Physics & Society | January 2019 | by Lauren J. Borja and M. V. Ramana, School of Public Policy and Global Affairs, University of British Columbia

In October 2018, the United States Government Accountability Organization (GAO) reported that “mission-critical cyber vulnerabilities” had been found in many weapon systems being developed by the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD). These vulnerabilities allowed testers to “take control of systems and largely operate undetected” [1, p. 21], and could allow hackers to do the same.

The GAO report identified three underlying reasons for this problem. First, computers have proliferated in the designs of almost all weapon systems and enable many of their functions and communications. Second, the DOD has only recently prioritized cybersecurity in its weapon systems; in many cases, cybersecurity was not even a consideration when earlier weapon systems were designed. Finally, the DOD has a shallow understanding of how to construct secure weapon systems after ignoring them for many years. As a result, the GAO report said, the DOD has fielded a generation of insecure weapon systems, which could jeopardize military networks for years to come.

At the United Nations, outer space used to be a realm of relative peace and cooperation. Every fall, virtually all the world’s nations are represented at the UN General Assembly’s First Committee meeting, which considers matters related to disarmament and international security, including in outer space. There, many space-related resolutions were typically so uncontroversial as to be adopted without a vote. The high level of cooperation allowed for broad international agreement on space policy, and generated some practical recommendations. For example, in 2013, a UN Group of Governmental Experts agreed on a set of “Transparency and Confidence Building Measures” on outer space, which the General Assembly has encouraged member states to implement. Among other things, the measures promote the exchange of information on space policies and activities, risk reduction efforts (like keeping spacecraft far enough apart to avoid collision), and visits to space launch facilities.

The diplomatic atmosphere, however, was dramatically different at this year’s First Committee session in October. The Committee adopted four resolutions dealing with outer space security—and the United States voted “no” on all four. These resolutions are not legally binding, but do set out policy positions and hence can be viewed as statements of political intent. By rejecting all four, Washington signaled, in effect, that whatever the international community sought to do on space concerns, it opposed. This was in stark contrast to previous years, when the United States did join the consensus on Transparency and Confidence Building Measures, and merely abstained on a resolution seeking to prevent an arms race in outer space.

At the invitation of the ICT4Peace Foundation, Paul Meyer, Senior Advisor of the Foundation, prepared his analysis of the most recent developments at the United Nations and elsewhere regarding the development and promotion of norms of responsible state behaviour in Cyberspace. He analyses the recent process at the UN (UN GGE, Open-ended Working Group), new instruments such as the Paris Call, Digital Peace Initiative, Digital Geneva Convention, and the recent norms proposal by the The Global Commission on the Stability of Cyberspace.

He concludes that the international community’s effort to develop norms of responsible state behaviour in cyberspace is currently facing a crisis that may also be an opportunity. The crisis is the breakdown of what had been a consensus at the United Nations as to how work on such norms should proceed. The failure of a UN expert group to agree on a report last year and the adoption of parallel and competing processes at this year’s General Assembly has cast a shadow on and much uncertainty as to the future direction of inter-governmental discussions.

This situation has however also presented an opportunity for other cyber security stakeholders in the private sector and civil society to highlight their own proposals for norms to govern state conduct. While there may be a risk of norms proliferation down the road, the near-term challenge will be for these stakeholders to find a way to engage states in a process to adopt and implement such norms of responsible state behaviour which they alone can realize.

Last month, the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) put out a report entitled The Nuclear Power Dilemma: Declining Profits, Plant Closures, and the Threat of Rising Carbon Emissions that calls for offering subsidies to unprofitable nuclear power plants. Not surprisingly, it has been widely welcomed by nuclear advocates, who interpret the report as essentially saying “yes to nuclear power” in order to reduce carbon emissions.

But that interpretation misses the many important but less prominent insights in the UCS report.

Nuclear power plants are associated with significantly less carbon dioxide emitted per unit of electricity produced when compared to fossil fuel plants, even when including the emissions associated with the fuel chain required to generate nuclear energy. Therefore, the report’s basis for argument—if utilities were to replace “existing nuclear plants with natural gas and coal rather than low-carbon sources,” then it would compromise “our ability to achieve the deep cuts in carbon emissions” (p. 1)—is obvious. Whether nuclear plants would be replaced by fossil fueled plants is questionable.